Have fun while traveling, ride a bike!

Winnetka Ave. bike lanes – Nordhoff to Devonshire

The Chatsworth Neighborhood Council recently passed a motion to support the installation of bike lanes on Winnetka Ave. between Nordhoff St. and Devonshire St. The project will extend existing lanes on Winnetka Ave. for 1.2 miles to the street’s terminus at Devonshire St. (one of the longest east-west bikeways in the city). Winnetka Ave. will become a north-south bike facility in the north-western San Fernando Valley, complimenting the new Orange Line Extension bike path (along Canoga Ave.), existing lanes on Wilbur Ave., and Reseda Blvd. to create a roughly 1.5 mile north-south grid. Special thanks to the Chatsworth NC, Councilman Englander (CD-12), and to everyone who came out last Wednesday night to support the project.

A Space for Bicyclists

One local bicyclist who came to support the project created a really good video that showcases his morning and evening commutes to work. The video makes it very clear that bike lanes on Winnetka Ave. will help improve the street’s safety for both bicyclists and drivers. The above video offers a glimpse of what bicycling conditions are like on the corridor in its present configuration – needless to say, less than desirable.

The Solution

Our current concept calls for conventional bike lanes where on-street parking already exists (approximately from Nordhoff to Plummer). The bike lanes will replace a peak hour travel lane and have the added benefit of allowing additional full-time automobile parking. An analysis of the street’s traffic patterns revealed that even with the lane removal to accommodate bike lanes/full time parking, Winnetka Ave. will still have excess service capacity during the peak hour (basically, the street can comfortably accommodate motor vehicle traffic with two travel lanes in each direction). Where parking currently does not exist, our design concept replaces a travel lane with a buffered bike lane.

Buffered Bike Lanes

Design concept for buffered bike lanes on Winnetka Ave.

Segments of the Winnetka bike lanes (between Plummer and Devonshire) will be buffered to provide further separation between vehicles and bicyclists. According to the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO), buffered bike lanes can also:

Provide a greater space for bicycling without making the bike lane appear so wide that it might be mistaken for a travel lane or a parking lane.

Encourage bicycling by contributing to the perception of safety among users of the bicycle network.

Provide space for bicyclists to pass another bicyclist without encroaching into the adjacent motor vehicle travel lane.

Expect the new Winnetka Ave. bike lanes to go in sometime this summer. As always, leave your thoughts in the comments section below.

There are those within the CA bicycle community who argue that creating a double-white line between the bike lane and the travel lane makes it illegal for a bicyclist to leave the bike lane for any reason.
For that reason, you see a lot of cities in CA providing visual breaks when they place more than one white stripe on the outside of the bike lane. LA has those reverse-chevron thingies. SF paints a “skip-stripe” to accomplish the same thing: http://sf.streetsblog.org/2012/01/23/caltrans-slims-the-sloat-boulevard-speedway-with-buffered-bike-lanes/

This is by far the best video that I seen that gives the audience a realistic picture of what the traffic speeds and typical bullying behavior of many motorists are towards bicyclists that would dare delay their progress in any way on many of the primary streets in the San Fernando Valley. It’s simply unnerving and dangerous to cycle on a street under these conditions.

I applaud the buffered bike lane concept that the LADOT has come up with. The volume and speed of traffic on this street warrants a need to go above the minimum requirements in order to significantly improve the comfort and safety for bicycling.

I simply find it amazing that anyone would choose to repeatedly use this section of Winnetka Ave for their daily commute by bicycle under these traffic conditions. This person is truly a road warrior. This video helps to demonstrate why most people consider bicycling on the streets in Los Angeles to be an extreme sport like sky diving.

I tried, on several weekends, to keep to the far right of traffic on Victory Blvd in the Balboa Park area, with a result that several drivers would use the far right lane to pass other vehicles. I ended up having to take the entire lane in order to keep cars from squeezing past me at a high rate of speed. It made me uncomfortable thinking about what might happen if a driver accelerated around the vehicle in front of them before noticing that I was in the lane that they were about to move into. That’s one reason why I try to dress like a glow worm while bicycling during the day.

It would be nice if LADOT could install crosswalk butons on the street side traffic light poles so that cyclists could trigger the light if they are not willing to use the left turn lane. Simular to those placed along bike paths. Road Loops are great but most of the time I don’t trigger them because I move over next to the curb when I get the a traffic light to allow vehicles to make a right turn with out me being in thier way.

Here’s a video, made by Mark Wagenbuur, which gives a brief explaination of how bicyclists are expected to make a turn in several European countries and some of the weaknesses in the infrastructure design for this:

Tina Backstrom–LADOT bikeways staff–at the last BPIT meeting mentioned that driveways were a problem for engineering a cycle track. So, if someone from LADOTBIKEBLOG could please point out these videos to her I would greatly appreciate it…

Driveways that cross a bike path in a residential area:

My idea that I brought up at the BPIT meeting for a bike lane to change into a bike path–that goes behind a traffic island bus stop at the nearside of a intersection–is illustrated more than once in this video that travels along several secondary streets in Utrecht:

This traffic island that contains a bus stop would continue past the crosswalk to provide a protected waiting area for cyclists at the intersection as illustrated in this video:

Another video which has blue boxes at top of screen that give arguments against bike paths next to streets and the green boxes that show how these potential problems are dealt with in the Netherlands: